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mōdgethanc wrote:Even my own mother, a bleeding-heart liberal, trolled my brothers about selling us to the Gypsies if we didn't behave. My own hypothesis about why the Roma get it so bad compared to other groups in Western culture is because they are one of the most deviant in their lifestyle. They don't conform to European norms, and get judged as depraved for it.

Awareness is a big problem I think. Discrimination against and persecution of other groups like Jews, African-Americans or homosexuals has at some point or other received more attention in society, be it from the victims standing up, others standing up for them, press, education etc., leading to a slow change in thinking and acting. But Gypsies? Few care, few talk about it, few stand up, and so discrimination and prejudice can just live on forever mostly unchallenged. Few even want to know, people are just glad if the "dirty/begging/stealing lowlifes" are moved somewhere far away.

Babbsagg wrote:Awareness is a big problem I think. Discrimination against and persecution of other groups like Jews, African-Americans or homosexuals has at some point or other received more attention in society, be it from the victims standing up, others standing up for them, press, education etc., leading to a slow change in thinking and acting. But Gypsies? Few care, few talk about it, few stand up, and so discrimination and prejudice can just live on forever mostly unchallenged. Few even want to know, people are just glad if the "dirty/begging/stealing lowlifes" are moved somewhere far away.

Yes, absolutely, it is a huge problem. Last I heard, even agencies (run entirely by non-Roma) that are supposed to be about Romani human rights are doing nothing to address the problem, and the only people who are actually doing anything about it are young Eastern European Roma. Even in academia, it is rarely discussed, and when it is, it's almost invariably about Europe even though Roma exist and suffer discrimination worldwide.

Prowler wrote:Back in the 80s/90s there wasn't much Islamophobia in Europe either.

Um...there was, it just wasn't so visible. Don't mistake a lack of visible racism for a lack of racist thoughts and feelings.

Yes, there is a well-studied effect by which negative reactions increase once a "foreign" population exceeds a certain threshold (generally about 10-15%). But that doesn't mean that negative attitudes weren't already present in the population. To suggest otherwise amounts to a sort of victim-blaming, as if there wouldn't be any problems with bigotry of the minority population just laid low and didn't draw attention to itself. But often the reason why these populations clump together is because there exists so much casual hostility within society.

The term "Islamophobia" is over a century old. Negative European views of Islam are a millennium older than that. If you didn't live through the massacres, hijackings, and bombings of the 70s and 80s (do the names "Black September", "Abu Nidal", and "Achille Lauro" mean anything to you?), you may not realise how far back the stereotype of the murderous Arab terrorist goes. It's been around my entire life.

Weren't we more concerned about all of those far-right and far-left groups committing terror acts back in the 70s-80s? I mean, ofc the whole "Muslims are terrorists" thing didn't just come up overnight, but 9/11 seems to have been the turning point to where people stopped looking at Islam with the same eyes as before forever. And those attacks in Madrid and London a few years later also added more fuel to the fire. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't until this century that people began talking about how "there's way too many Arabs/Muslims in Europe".

Although, it seemed to me that, this decade, things were starting to slow down and that people weren't hating as much on Muslims anymore, as Bin Laden died and no big terror attacks were happening anymore. Then came Daesh and the Paris attack and it seems like we're in 2001-2005 again with everyone making bets where "they" will strike next.

To get back on topic, I don't imagine many people outside the US have heard about the controversy around the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street. This commentary by Caroline Criado Perez pretty well sums up my take on the topic, but what I found particularly interesting was her summary of a census of statuary in the UK from the point of view of representation:

Caroline Criado Perez wrote:Of the 253 statues of women, 71 were of women who actually existed. The vast majority of those were of royal women (with the vast majority of those being of Queen Victoria, whose love of erecting statues of herself I have a grudging respect for).

Only 25 female statues (remember, out of a total of 925) were of non-royal, historical women. The corresponding figure for men was 498. There were almost twice the number of statues of men called John (43), as there were of non-royal historical women.

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

linguoboy wrote:To get back on topic, I don't imagine many people outside the US have heard about the controversy around the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street. This commentary by Caroline Criado Perez pretty well sums up my take on the topic

rekt

I've followed the controversy over the gross shit like a brodude pretending to sexually assault the statue (aside from its being a feminist symbol, it's also a little girl, so WTF douche) but I never thought before that the concept "bull" has other connotations than a raging st- ... ock market. It's widely used in porn to mean "virile, sexually aggressive man".

Prowler wrote:Weren't we more concerned about all of those far-right and far-left groups committing terror acts back in the 70s-80s?

I'm not sure what this means exactly, but if you mean that terrorism by Islamist groups was regarded more as just a specific strain with nationalist terrorism rather than as a unique scourge, you're probably right. Much of what I've read and seen from that time talks about the connexions between various groups (e.g. the RAF going to Jordan to train with the PLFP and PLO guerrillas).

Prowler wrote:I mean, ofc the whole "Muslims are terrorists" thing didn't just come up overnight, but 9/11 seems to have been the turning point to where people stopped looking at Islam with the same eyes as before forever. And those attacks in Madrid and London a few years later also added more fuel to the fire. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't until this century that people began talking about how "there's way too many Arabs/Muslims in Europe".

There was definitely a change of rhetoric in the public sphere after 9/11. Whether there was really a shift in perception is another question. I know that many Balkan Christians have always viewed Muslims in Europe as a foreign presence with no real right to be there.

Anti-immigrant feeling was already high in places with large Muslim populations like France and Germany back in the 70s and 80s. It wasn't necessarily specifically anti-Muslim in character, but that doesn't mean people there felt positively about Islam and welcomed its practice. Even if most of Western Europe is only nominally Christian, there's still a lot of Christian chauvinism around. Just ask the Jews.

"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

linguoboy wrote:To get back on topic, I don't imagine many people outside the US have heard about the controversy around the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street. This commentary by Caroline Criado Perez pretty well sums up my take on the topic.

It was in the news here. First an article about the Fearless Girl statue, later an later an article about it staying longer than the originally planned month, and earlier this week one about the artist of the Charging Bull statue not liking the Fearless Girl statue "because it turns his statue into something negative".

I like Fearless Girl, I hope it'll be kept there permanently. And I think it's perfectly possible to still consider Charging Bull on its own, as its maker intended it, as a symbol of “the strength and power of the American people”; and consider Fearless Girl as a symbol of female strength; and consider them both together as a symbol of female resistance against the patriarchy, effectively making three works of art out of two.

I also find it rather hypocritical to plant a statue in a public area without permission and then complain about another statue planted in the same public area (but with permission).

linguoboy wrote:There was definitely a change of rhetoric in the public sphere after 9/11. Whether there was really a shift in perception is another question. I know that many Balkan Christians have always viewed Muslims in Europe as a foreign presence with no real right to be there.

Anti-immigrant feeling was already high in places with large Muslim populations like France and Germany back in the 70s and 80s. It wasn't necessarily specifically anti-Muslim in character, but that doesn't mean people there felt positively about Islam and welcomed its practice. Even if most of Western Europe is only nominally Christian, there's still a lot of Christian chauvinism around. Just ask the Jews.

My mother's cousin was married to a guy who always stressed that he was Christian Albanian. I always wondered at the time (I must have seen him for the last time in the 90s or so) why he was always stressing it that much since Islam wasn't even a topic back then. Sure, people tend to think of Albanians as Muslims, but I didn't really get it at the time. Apparently, he said stuff like "They all have 9 kids who are on the street the whole day because no-one takes care of them." about Muslim Albanians. The less is said about him, the better, though, because he really treated my mother's cousin very badly in the end. He also once made a "dark skin = lazy" joke about blacks when he saw a black player in a PC game I was playing, which I considered quite odd considering how dark his own complexion was by German/European standards.

There definitely have been tons of books, newspaper articles, talk shows etc. about Islam since 9/11 whereas before, interest just wasn't there. I once read an article where a journalist mentioned that he was criticised for "wasting his time" researching some Islam-related topic and then 9/11 happened and all of a sudden, it wasn't seen that way any longer. At my school, they quickly introduced the topic "Europe and Islam" in history lessons after 9/11 and since then, it's standard to learn about other major world religions in RE lessons several times over the years. Even I had to read and watch some of the material twice in it and back in my days, you didn't learn about that in primary school etc. Debates about Islam have pretty much dominated the whole century here whereas that was very different before.

Today's news headline reads: P. Alexandrou's sentence for the atrocious murder of beautiful Danielle to be handed down on 13/06.

Who in their right mind feels the need to emphasize a murder victim's attractiveness?

(Danielle was an immigrant woman murdered by a gang which included her ex-partner P. Alexandrou, in 2015 - and that's relevant detail because femmecide by ex-partners, especially with immigrant women as the victims, is so common in Cyprus it has become a bit banal, like traffic accident deaths)

Yesterday, at work, one of my co-workers and I were IMing each other. At some point, he told me about some comment he made on a Facebook page or something for pet-lovers once using the words "boobs" and "tits" in reference to boobies and tits, which he thought was witty. I wrote something like "I wonder whether women would find that joke offensive," then started to get worried that he might get offended by me saying that and added "lol" so maybe he wouldn't.

Alas, he did get offended, but to my surprise, it wasn't me he found offensive. "Oh my God Vijay, don't get me started!" he wrote before going off on a mini-rant about how "women these days want too much, it's like they've gone completely nuts" and something about how true gender equality is "biologically impossible anyway" (as if that was ever the point...). He also said this was why he avoided discussing things with anyone except a few people he felt safe doing this with, one of which is me and another of which is, ironically, a woman. My brain begged me to change the subject.

vijayjohn wrote:Yesterday, at work, one of my co-workers and I were IMing each other. At some point, he told me about some comment he made on a Facebook page or something for pet-lovers once using the words "boobs" and "tits" in reference to boobies and tits, which he thought was witty. I wrote something like "I wonder whether women would find that joke offensive," then started to get worried that he might get offended by me saying that and added "lol" so maybe he wouldn't.

Alas, he did get offended, but to my surprise, it wasn't me he found offensive. "Oh my God Vijay, don't get me started!" he wrote before going off on a mini-rant about how "women these days want too much, it's like they've gone completely nuts" and something about how true gender equality is "biologically impossible anyway" (as if that was ever the point...). He also said this was why he avoided discussing things with anyone except a few people he felt safe doing this with, one of which is me and another of which is, ironically, a woman. My brain begged me to change the subject.

There was this other guy who was so creepy (towards women specifically) and sexist that he was fired within just a few weeks. This guy used to hang out with him. I didn't really understand why. Now I guess I can kinda see why.

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